| Oku | |
|---|---|
| Kuɔ | |
| Native to | Cameroon |
Native speakers | 87,000 (from the 2005 census)1 |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | oku |
| Glottolog | okuu1243 |
Oku (Ebkuo, Ekpwo, Ukfwo, Bvukoo, Kuɔ) is a Grassfields Bantoid language that is primarily spoken by the Oku people of northwest Cameroon, a fondom of the Tikar people. They are a different ethnic group from the Oku people of Sierra Leone.
Phonology
Consonants
Oku has 21 consonant phonemes.2 The consonant phoneme inventory of the language is shown below.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain | Labialized | |||||||
| Stop/Affricate | voiceless | /t/ | /t͡ʃ/ | /k/ | /kʷ/ | |||
| voiced | /b/ | /d/ | /d͡ʒ/ | /g/ | /gʷ/ | |||
| Fricative | voiceless | /f/ | /s/ | |||||
| voiced | /ɣ/ | /ɣʷ/ | ||||||
| Nasal | /m/ | /m̩/a | /n/ | //N//b | /ŋ/ | |||
| Lateral | /l/ | |||||||
| Glide | /j/ | /w/ | ||||||
- a syllabic /m/
- an archiphoneme that only appears stem-initially
Davis argues that Oku has five nasal phonemes. These are three non-syllabic nasals (/m/, /n/, and /ŋ/), syllabic /m̩/, and archiphonemic //N//.2 /m̩/ does not assimilate to the following consonant. However //N// assimilates before all consonants except /f/, /t͡ʃ/, and /d͡ʒ/, where it becomes /n/. 2
Vowels
Davis describes the following vowels in her thesis.2
| Front | Back | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unrounded | Rounded | ||||||
| High | Tense | /i/ | /iː/ | /u/ | /uː/ | ||
| Lax | /ɪ/ | /ɪː/ | |||||
| Mid | Tense | /ə/ | /əː/ | ||||
| Lax | /ɛ/ | /ɛː/ | /ɔ/ | /ɔː/ | |||
| Low | /ɑ/ | /ɑː/ | |||||
Orthography
The Oku alphabet has 25 letters.3
| a | b | ch | d | dz | e | ɛ | ə | f | g | gh | i | j | k | l | m | n | ŋ | o | p | s | t | w | y | z |
References
References
- Oku at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- Davis, Leslie Kim (December 1992). A Segmental Phonology of the Oku Language (PDF) (MA thesis). University of Texas at Arlington. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2023-12-12.
- Blood & Davis 1999.
Further reading
Further reading
- Blood, Cynthia L.; Davis, Leslie (1999). Oku- English Provisional Lexicon (PDF). Yaoundé: SIL. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-03-15.
- Nforbi, Emmanuel (April 1993). Oku Verb Morphology: Tense Aspect and Mood (PDF) (post-graduate diploma thesis). University of Yaoundé I. Retrieved March 2, 2018.